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Kwame Kilpatrick’s Mistress Christine Beatty Details Affair In New Book

Christine Beatty, who made national headlines back in 2008 when she was exposed as the infamous mistress of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, is now giving her side of the story.

During a recent interview with Essence magazine, Christine goes into detail about Kwame’s dirty-dog days as her lover, how the affair effected her children, and more.

via Detroit Free Press

The woman at the heart of the text-messaging scandal that felled former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick opens up about her life, her family and her notorious affair in the November issue of Essence Magazine.

Kilpatrick’s former chief of staff and mistress, Christine Beatty, says she has begun a “journey of self-forgiveness” and has learned that redemption is a process.

In 2008, Beatty pleaded guilty to two felony obstruction of justice charges after the Free Press published text messages that showed she lied under oath about her affair with Kilpatrick during a police whistle-blower trial.

Beatty was sentenced to 120 days in jail and released after serving about 70 days. She moved in February 2010 to Atlanta.

The article, called “A Real-Life Scandal,” begins with Beatty describing the difficulty of saying good-bye to her 8- and 10-year-old daughters on Jan. 5, 2009, the day she started her jail sentence.

Beatty said she “could barely breathe” when she first learned one year earlier that the intimate text messages she swapped with the mayor were about to be made public. That night, she said, she had painful conversations with her family members and her ex-husband, Lou Beatty III.

When the scandal broke, Beatty left her high-profile job and dropped out of law school.

She said she watched President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony on TV from a hard bench in her Wayne County Jail cell — while thinking about how, just 18 months earlier, she had sat with him in a meeting to discuss Kilpatrick’s support of his upcoming presidential campaign.

Christine also describes her lengthy love affair with the married Kilpartick, whom she’d dated in high school, in detail.

“For years I would think fondly of our first kiss, the one we shared sitting on my mother’s couch after our first date,” Beatty writes. “That kiss, passionate yet gentle, was the sweetest thing I had ever experienced.” Beatty says she and Kilpatrick were first intimate in 2002. At the time, she writes, her marriage was crumbling.

“I knew immediately that we had crossed a line, but there was no turning back,” she says.

Beatty said by the time she and her husband separated in 2004, she was “totally consumed” by the affair, even wondering in the mornings whether Kilpatrick would approve of her outfit choices.

“We would find any spare time we could to be together, at the office or at my home when my children weren’t there. He made me laugh, he made me angry, he propelled me to ecstasy and reduced me to tears, but most important, I felt he loved me unconditionally,” she writes.

Beatty says she and Kilpatrick both knew what they were doing was wrong, but attempts to stop their physical relationship failed.

“I felt such shame that at church I would sit in the pews in the back, barely able to lift my hands to praise God,” she writes.

Beatty writes that while she was professionally shunned in the aftermath of the scandal, Kilpatrick left jail and landed a six-figure job as an account executive at Compuware, a job he later lost.

The former mayor is due in court next week to be sentenced following his March conviction in a public corruption trial.

While there’s no question that there’s clear double standard regarding men who cheat versus women who cheat and are publicly exposed, this married woman carried on an affair with a very married public figure after saying herself that she knew what she was doing was wrong. It’s a little late to play the sympathy card, no?

You can check out the full interview with Christine Beatty in the November issue of Essence which hits stands on Thursday, October 10.

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